AMD (NYSE: AMD) announced today that Mark Papermaster, 50, has joined as the company’s senior vice president and chief technology officer. He will report to President and Chief Executive Officer Rory Read and will oversee all of AMD’s engineering, research and development (R&D), and product development functions as the head of the newly-formed Technology and Engineering Group. Papermaster, who was most recently vice president of Silicon Engineering at Cisco, will be responsible for establishing and executing the company’s technology and product roadmaps, integrated hardware and software development, and overseeing the creation of all of AMD’s products.

The advanced research and development team led by Senior Vice President of Research and Development Chekib Akrout, as well as the engineering teams residing in AMD’s Products Group, will now report to Papermaster. Akrout, 53, will maintain responsibility for leading AMD’s processor core development as well as system-on-a-chip (SoC) design methodology. In recognition of his ongoing technical and management contributions, Akrout will continue serving on AMD’s senior leadership team responsible for key decision making and strategy setting.

“Mark’s appointment significantly strengthens AMD’s senior leadership,” Read said. “Mark has held substantial engineering roles for three of the technology industry’s most innovative companies. He is a proven winner who knows the industry, knows our customers and flat out knows technology.

“The newly-created technology and engineering group aligns all of AMD’s outstanding technical talent into a centralized team which will improve our time-to-market and help lift our execution across the board. Most importantly, this new organization accelerates our ability to consistently deliver on our customer commitments and help our customers win.”

At Cisco, Papermaster was responsible for the silicon strategy, architecture, and development for the company’s switching and routing businesses. Prior to Cisco, Papermaster served as Apple’s senior vice president of Devices Hardware Engineering responsible for the iPod and iPhone hardware development. He has also held a number of senior leadership roles at IBM, serving on the company’s Technical Leadership Team and overseeing development of key microprocessors and blade server technologies.

Papermaster has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from The University of Vermont. He is a member of the University of Texas Cockrell School of Engineering Advisory Board and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation IT Advisory Committee. Papermaster will be based in Sunnyvale, California.

He was involved with development with the iPad and iPhone, that's pretty good on my book. What the iPad and iPhone did was literally improve and improve.
So Mark Papermaster should be able to maybe turn around the development team, and TELL THEM TO RELEASE CHIP'S THAT ARE VIABLE IMPROVEMENTS AND NOT SIDE GRADES WITH BULLSHIT MARKETING.
(They still might fail badly if they continue to use SoC system)

The question I have is this newly-created technology and engineering group a doing of Rory, or was that something in the works before his a arrival. AMD needs a good shake-down and if the is Rory’s' maneuvering already we might see Eng-R&D-Fab really start coordinating to get the job done. AMD needed a Rory... I'm encouraged he could be the Maharishi; something like Steve Jobs did upon the return to Apple.

The question I have is this newly-created technology and engineering group a doing of Rory, or was that something in the works before his a arrival. AMD needs a good shake-down and if the is Rory’s' maneuvering already we might see Eng-R&D-Fab really start coordinating to get the job done. AMD needed a Rory... I'm encouraged he could be the Maharishi; something like Steve Jobs did upon the return to Apple.

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I hope it is his doing. Obviously Thomas Seifert was an incompetent interim CEO. I won't blame Rory for the mess that is BD, because that falls squarely on those that came before him, but if PD sucks just as bad, they might as well give up on desktops all together and concentrate on laptops and GPU's. They should just save themselves the embarrassment and scrap any plans for another desktop CPU if the next one will be more of the same.

I hope it is his doing. Obviously Thomas Seifert was an incompetent interim CEO. I won't blame Rory for the mess that is BD, because that falls squarely on those that came before him, but if PD sucks just as bad, they might as well give up on desktops all together and concentrate on laptops and GPU's. They should just save themselves the embarrassment and scrap any plans for another desktop CPU if the next one will be more of the same.

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Once again, more than 98% of people don't know jack about computer technology. With proper advertisements AMD can and will sell a shit load of Bulldozer based platforms no matter how slow and/or fast the CPU is. But yes they better get there act together and make miracles happen with Piledriver for the sake of Competition.

Once again, and again, if it wasn't for the AMD Athlon 64, we would probably be playing with Pentium 4's on crack right now running at 8GHz+

Once again, more than 98% of people don't know jack about computer technology. With proper advertisements AMD can and will sell a shit load of Bulldozer based platforms no matter how slow and/or fast the CPU is. But yes they better get there act together and make miracles happen with Piledriver for the sake of Competition.

Once again, and again, if it wasn't for the AMD Athlon 64, we would probably be playing with Pentium 4's on crack right now running at 8GHz+

Once again, more than 98% of people don't know jack about computer technology. With proper advertisements AMD can and will sell a shit load of Bulldozer based platforms no matter how slow and/or fast the CPU is. But yes they better get there act together and make miracles happen with Piledriver for the sake of Competition.

Once again, and again, if it wasn't for the AMD Athlon 64, we would probably be playing with Pentium 4's on crack right now running at 8GHz+

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Well the hitting the speed wall where chips literally melt themselves would have put Intel in it's place. But would we have gone to 64bit as fast? No.

Same with multiple cores. Eventually we would have gotten there but without AMD around, Intel has no motivation to make good products.

Not just Intel, any 800lb Gorilla needs a little monkey with a pointy poop stick to prod them along. Otherwise they'd just get fat, sitting around doing nothing but eatin and matin. Then next thing you know they are sitting on an enormous surplus and the urge to roll over and innovate vanishes. Oops, inside Apple joke

With proper advertisements AMD can and will sell a shit load of Bulldozer based platforms no matter how slow and/or fast the CPU is.

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Yup.
Which presupposes a couple of points:
1. Globalfoundries can actually produce a "shit load" of Bulldozer CPU's in a time frame acceptable to OEM's, and..
2. AMD and successful marketing are as synonymous as Tahiti and alpine skiing. This is, after all a company that marketed it's top-of-the-line desktop CPU's using a comic book.

i don't think so as the new core arch.was under R&D from a while but not ready

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Mark my words, AMD has absolutely no choice but to Innovate and fight hard to stay in the game, they've been trying hard for many years to be different vs. Intel.
AMD's the one which lead the industry to 64-Bit, Multi-Core Desktop CPU's, stuck with DDR and so on. Intel didn't want to go that route, but had no choice because the Industry followed AMD, not Intel.

Intel can afford mistakes, AMD cannot, which is why they must find the monster within Bulldozer and let it loose.